Staff Software Engineer, Back End

Primer exists to make the world a safer place.  We do this by providing trusted decision-ready AI to the world's most critical organizations.  Our software enables leaders, operators, and analysts to better understand the changing world around us in real time and make informed decisions when the stakes are high.  Primer has offices in San Francisco, Pasadena, CA and Arlington, VA.  For more information, please visit https://primer.ai/

As a Staff Software Engineer, Back End you will have the opportunity to make a wide impact on our tooling, coding standards, and codebase. Additionally, you will take the lead on building new or updating data driven product features working with cross functional teams to solve the technical challenges of our natural language processing and machine learning technology. 

We believe in creating an environment that encourages and creates opportunities for growth. Whether it’s helping create and contribute to a set of architectural principles, or pushing us to adopt high-impact OSS, we need engineers to help us make those decisions.

Roles and Responsibilities - How You Will Make an Impact

• Architect and extend scalable ingest pipelines and data stores to ingest, analyze, and understand large volumes of data


• Design, package, and optimize the Delta product for deployment in diverse environments, including on-premises, cloud, and single-machine setup, ensuring smooth and scalable operation.


• Collaborate with teams on the Delta product to design an information retrieval architecture to analyze and conduct search on documents and graphs


• Work with machine learning engineers and data scientists to extend the platform’s capabilities to new models and algorithms while maintaining performance metrics


• Work on massive datasets, integrating with features such as event and topic detection, relation extraction, summarization, entity recognition, document classification, multilingual NLP and knowledge base generation

Relevant Skills and Experience

• Experience leading commercial software technical projects end-to-end in an agile environment on any major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc)


• Experience with data ingestion, processing and data retrieval systems at scale


• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Kubernetes), configuration management (Terraform, Pulumi), deployment automation (Github Actions)


• Experience with working with real-time and distributed systems


• 5+ years of shipping production grade software


• Expertise in Python and Golang


• Expertise in Flask, ElasticSearch, PostgreSQL, Redis

Bonus Points

• Data-driven engineering; using metrics to drive decisions and inform performance and cost tradeoffs


• Hands-on DevOps experience with cloud infrastructure and/or on-prem software installation


• Experience with Kafka and Graph DBs


• Work experience in NLP/AI/ML focused companies

This role will consider applicants out of San Francisco, CA or Washington, DC

The annual cash compensation range for this position is US$210,000 to US$240,000.  Final compensation will be determined based on experience and skills and may vary from the range listed above.

Primer works closely with the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment. Any offer of employment is conditioned on an applicant or employee being able to meet any applicable government contract requirements. The company may rescind any offer of employment to an applicant or terminate an employee if the applicant or employee is unable to perform the functions of the position in compliance with applicable government contracts or if an applicant or employee makes a false attestation of compliance.

What We Offer

We are a series D funded company with investors from Addition, USIT, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners, Addition Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and others.  We are intentional around building a diverse and inclusive team of subject matter experts to better advocate for the needs of our users. 

We care a lot about our work and about the well being of our team. We encourage everyone to work at a sustainable pace and have a flexible vacation policy for team members to utilize, Wellness Days and 100% paid leave for parents of growing families.

We offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits. This includes full medical, dental, and vision coverage, fertility benefits through Carrot, mental health coverage on demand with Headspace Care+, Gympass+ Membership via Wellhub, One Medical Membership, 401(k), remote work stipends, and monthly internet allowance.

Primer is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. Please see the United States Department of Labor's EEO poster and EEO poster supplement for additional information.

If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at info@primer.com.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.